Let me explain the question:
If fox news and religious propaganda are exactly that, propaganda, then they are victims.
If, however, every person is free to listen to what they want and then rant against liberals, migrants, Muslims, Arabs, trans, gays, atheists, you name it, then they are just gullible.
I’d have more patience for a victim than a gullible person.
Everybody is free to believe what they want to believe. What I don’t get is why they have to stir things up and why they believe they are the only ones getting it and everyone else is dumb, woke, a communist or is going to hell. Why can’t they keep their opinions to themselves?
Oh, for fucks sake, not another one of these “I’m so smart, listen to me” posts.
“Gullible” individuals, huh? You know what’s gullible?
Thinking that anyone on this godforsaken platform is gonna change their mind because of some fancy-pants post with big words and a bunch of notes.
Newsflash, @lemmy.world: people are stupid, and they’re gonna believe what they wanna believe, no matter how many facts you throw at 'em.
You’re just preaching to the choir, sweetheart.
You think you’re so much better than everyone else with your “informative” post and your 19.4k notes?
Please, you’re just another self-congratulatory, circle-jerking, echo-chamber-dwelling, bleeding-heart liberal who thinks they can change the world with a few clever sentences.
Wake up, buttercup, the world don’t work that way.
And by the way, what the fuck is “vestigia.tumblr.com/r/no-stupid-questions”?
Sounds like some hipster nonsense to me.
2/10, mostly for the condescending use of “sweetheart”. Without that, 1/10. You can do better trolling than that.
They aren’t victims, but they wish they were. They’re awful people who want to be openly awful to others to feel better about themselves, and fox “news” lets them indulge their awful impulses and emboldens them to be the awful people they want to be. Then when they get confronted for being awful, they play the victim instead of learning to live and let live.
Obviously this isn’t true of all fox viewers or religious people, but I have been thinking about this lately as our new dynamic. It’s not supposedly about the best way to help people anymore (and what we can/can’t or should/shouldn’t do), it’s now one side that still supposedly wants to help people and one that has given up the pretense entirely and only stands for cruelty.
Stupidity is a moral flaw, not an intellectual one.
Think that anyone who would find that stuff compelling is not in a good place emotionally or mentally. Now, ideally they should be pulled out of that, and you do occasionally hear stories about people leaving extremist groups like Qanon because they found a healthy hobby or community. On the other hand, I don’t think humans can really be separated cleanly between victim and victimizer, and the people this questions describing often become a danger to other people.
People affected by confirmation bias are NEVER VICTIMS.
I for one am done trying to empathize with and understand regressives. Its not complex. They are children, plain and simple. Developmentally they are children. When you give the car keys to your 7 year old the results are predictable.
When you stop empathizing with people, you’ve taken a step toward dehumanizing them. You aren’t under any obligation to empathize, and goodness knows it is tiring. However, it is important to realize that once you stop empathizing, you are more likely to accept extreme solutions in a subconscious attempt to resolve your frustration.
Sympathize? Sure. To empathize would be me taking on the burden of their mental illness. Not healthy for anyone involved. To sympathize requires understanding. I understand them, they are children. Do we dehumanize children or use “extreme solutions” on children? No we dont, however we treat them appropriately…as children and we’d be negligent to give children the car keys.
Depending on your definitions (empathy, sympathy, and compassion are often confusingly defined and contradictory between dictionaries), you ARE empathizing by realizing they are mental children. You’re just not sympathizing and therefore deciding no longer to act with compassion, which makes plenty of sense to me.
IMHO it’s good to empathize with the right (understand your attacker), but it’s also important have to understand that whatever the underlying reasons, these people, when activated into an idiot army they become a dangerous group.
The definitions that make the most sense to me is
Empathy - understanding the perspective of another, where there desires and fears come from. It takes intelligence to not just project one’s own personality on everyone else and understand that they are different.
Sympathy - Feeling in sync with another (like when you speak of sympathetic guitar strings causing each other to vibrate). Like you see the bombing in Gaza and not just understand that they don’t want to be bombed (empathy), but imagining the pain of losing your child.
Compassion - The positive treatment of another due to having sympathy for them
I think you have the words the other way around
Honestly, I think there is a real problem with infantilisation - and (Warning: unpopular opinion) a large part of this is the marvel films and manga trend. Those always over simplify every problem to a short, violent solution.
Those always over simplify every problem to a short, violent solution.
Yeah, entertainment totally didn’t do this before Marvel and manga. 🤨
Seriously, blaming entertainment (actual entertainment, not “news” that weasels in court calling itself entertainment) has been a thing since the stone ages. It wasn’t true about rock and roll, it wasn’t true about dime novels, it’s not true now about superhero stuff.
Are we really that sure that tv did not actually “rot people’s brains” to varying degrees? I would be interested in a more rigorous study of this before we dismiss all entertainment influences as simple culture war bullshit due to the genuinely overwhelming overuse of culture war arguments.
I’ve looked into this before for arguments with my mother trying to get her to stop saying there’s a gay agenda. Her argument was because I enjoy the videogames and sci-fi I wasn’t smart enough to understand the truth. The science has actually been done (though I’m sure more still needs to be done).
Research by a scientist named Schwartz in 2016 showed that those predisposed to anti-social behaviour are also naturally pre-disposed to watch more TV. When accounting for genetic traits, previous research into negative affects of TV didn’t hold up amongst children and young adults (mentally, physically yes, but we already knew sedentary lifestyle has negative impacts).
A (I Believe Johns Hopkins but I’m going from memory) 20 year data evaluation released in 2021 showed that excessive TV can contribute to cognitive decline over time (they measured a 0.5% reduction amongst the adults they tested). The main scientist I remember saying they didn’t account for type of media and did think educational content like documentaries would have a smaller impact though he couldn’t guess by how much. His worry wasn’t about the average adult making decisions but rather preserving as much mental capacity long term so as to help reduce impacts of dementia.
A 2023 UK study backed up the 2021 and 2016 study. Excess causes increased health risks and a long term small measurable cognitive decline.
Everything I’ve seen points to, for the most part, the amount being the problem as with everything. Moderation is key and living a diverse life that stimulates you mentally overall is important. Manga or Marvel movies when you want to relax is not going to rot your brain. Only consuming them will, same as with any type of media or genre.
“willing victimhood” is certainly a thing.
I’d put them on the same level of victimhood as followers of people like Charles Manson. They probably wouldn’t have done what they did without his influence but they’re still culpable for the damage they’ve caused.
“If somebody spends the whole day watching fox or religious propaganda, gets worked up and all he can think of is owning a liberal or converting an unbeliever, is this person a victim or just gullible?”
Neither. Such folks (Along with their “enemies” on the opposite end of the sociocultural continuum, who get all of their intell from The Daily Show and Vox)are case studies in the willfull devolution of modern humans. The sooner all of them guzzle down a gallon of Draino each, the saner this planet will be
discussions like this always bring me back to the Dead Kennedy’s song Stars and Stripes of Corruption
Not only is the music one of their greatest, but the lyrics are Jello Biafra’s best. If you have never heard it, imagine surf guitar, fast pace and a poet that can unleash lyrics at bullet speeds while staying in tone and driving the beat. The end of their career finale and IMO their magnum opus. The lyrics are just so good. Here is one part that I really think about alot…
But what can just one of us do
Against all that money and power trying to crush us into roaches?
We won’t destroy society in a day
Until we change ourselves first from the inside out
We can start by not lying so much and treating other people like dirt
It’s so easy not to base our lives on how much we can scam
And you know it feels good to lift that monkey off our back
Too great a tune not to include a link for the uninitiated!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=983DwAOCXRI
The end of their career finale
Apart from Bedtime for Democracy (SaSoC is on Frankenchrist) ;-)
Bedtime is good but it’s the post breakup album haha so does it really count?
Fair point :-)
Tldr “In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence”
there a victim as not everyone is the same and there’s always unknown mental disorders some people have or exposed to lead that fucked there brain up, poor childhood, other reasons.
People are not born evil. Nobody just is born and wants others to die. All of it is a learned trait and often times from these organizations is how these evil things spread.
They are gullible because there a victim of The propaganda and what they learned (usually by force without consent) growing up.
Saying people are dumb or need to “grow up” just is another way to put it into aggressive “us vs them” mindsets.
Nobody is born to be evil or cruel. No body. It is learned behavior and we should destroy the organization and practices that create these behaviors regardless of what political side there on. (Although conservative ones have the absolute worst ones though)
They’re absolutely NOT a victim. A victim is an unwilling participant in an act committed against them.
Stupidity isn’t not a viable excuse to be a victim.
It absolutely is. Consider elderly people getting scammed. You really want to defend the fact that they aren’t victims?
Blame is not a finite resource. Just because 2 people are involved doesn’t mean they’re both 50% to blame — they can both be 100% at fault.
So to answer your question, the person is responsible for their onerous views. They chose to watch that trash and believe it. We can have compassion for them without absolving them of blame. At the same time, they are a victim of the people lying to them. So it’s fine to blame the person consuming the bullshit and the person producing the bullshit, and the fact that there are 2 people to blame doesn’t make either of them any less to blame.
They are falling for engagement strategies all news media outlets use. They will say things that pander to a specific group pointing the finger at the other side so you’ll stuck with their station. Both liberal and conservative sites do this. Journalism is dead
